The guided-missile destroyer USS Mitscher welcomes the French tall ship replica the Hermione off the east coast of the US, in 2015.
Photograph: US Navy/Reuters

The American war of independence was a global conflict. Ignored in the popular narrative of Minutemen fighting British regulars is the sea, and the ongoing conflict between the British and French navies.

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Nathaniel Philbrick, perhaps most familiar to readers for In the Heart of the Sea, has now completed a popular-history trilogy on the American Revolution that began with Bunker Hill and continued with Valiant Ambition, a study of the middle period focusing on the treason (to American eyes) of Benedict Arnold. In his third book, Philbrick restores the sea to “the center of the story” and shows that George Washington understood better than most that control of the water would mean victory. For this, he depended on the French fleet of the Comte de Grasse.

This is no jingoistic, mythologised retelling. Philbrick is clear-eyed. As he writes, “[t]he bitter truth was that by the summer of 1781, the American Revolution had failed”. Men refused to serve, and Washington was left with a force of only 2,500. For Washington, a decisive blow could only come in one way, French assistance, and from one direction: the sea.

Adding a sailor’s perspective, Philbrick writes deftly, with enough military analysis to satisfy the interested reader

The race, then, was to get to the mouth of the Chesapeake sufficient troops to contain Gen Cornwallis on a small peninsula. The French arrived first and on 5 September 1781 “a naval battle fought between the French and British was largely responsible for the independence of the United States”. The Battle of the Chesapeake counted as enough of a French victory that the British fleet returned to New York and Cornwallis was left on his own. With 36 French ships present, the siege of Yorktown could begin.

All wars have a surprising number of baffling incidents that could have turned the tide, but the Revolution in 1781 seems to contain a shockingly high number of them. As Philbrick writes, “the fortunes of the empire were in thrall to a dangerously reckless field general who defiantly disregarded the perils presented by the sea. A forceful commander in chief might have contained Cornwallis. Not Henry Clinton [.]” Adm George Rodney failed to forward information that the French fleet was sailing to the Chesapeake.

More broadly, “a strange sort of languor had gripped British military leadership”. When the command finally awoke to the danger, it was too late.

Perhaps most damaging of all were Cornwallis’s decisions to remain encamped in Yorktown when he had naval cover to escape (“passive beyond our expectation”, in Washington’s words) and to concentrate his forces – which permitted the bombardment that led to his surrender.

Yorktown did not end the war. Indeed, De Grasse lost a battle in 1782 that encouraged Britain to make peace, knowing the Caribbean would remain British. To the end, Washington worried about the commitment of his army and Congress. But Britain too was tired of war and negotiators had instructions to concede independence.

Many familiar figures of the Revolutionary period – the Marquis de Lafayette, Rochambeau, Sir Henry Clinton, even Arnold (who sacked both Richmond and, brutally, New London in Connecticut) – appear in Philbrick’s story. Adding a sailor’s perspective to his accounts, he writes deftly, with enough military analysis to satisfy the interested reader though not perhaps the academic.

Despite this musical choice, the world had not been completely turned over. At a dinner the night of the surrender, the Americans were upset that the French officers preferred the company of the British. But the revolution set in motion ideas and forces that would be impossible to contain. As Philbrick writes, “[m]ore than a few of the French officers who chose to ignore their American allies that evening were destined to lose their eloquently coiffed heads to the guillotine”.

Nor were ideas contained in America. For Philbrick, Yorktown is “also where the road to the civil war began”, in the appalling decision that escaped slaves who fled to the British be returned to their masters. Liberty had its limits, even if Washington decided at the end of his life to free the slaves he owned himself.

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Missed opportunities lay behind British lines too. Philbrick writes that Clinton could have restored civil government in New York as “a vibrant example of how the British empire could restore peace, order and English liberty throughout war-torn America. Instead, he turned it into a patriot killing ground,” with about 18,000 dead from war’s effects. “No portion of the United States had witnessed more death,” Philbrick writes.

Several years ago, experts at the National Army Museum voted Washington Britain’s greatest military enemy. Philbrick’s trilogy has reinforced that judgment. But there was more to him. George III said that if Washington retired to his farm rather than seizing political power, he would be “the greatest man in the world”. He did so – if briefly – resigning his commission to Congress in late 1783. Philbrick praises Washington’s “humanizing lack of pretention that saved him from the pomposity that afflicted so many of his contemporaries”.

For Philbrick, Washington “had long since learned that greatness was attained not by insisting on what was right for oneself but by doing what was right for others. [A] ‘great mind knows how to make personal sacrifices to secure an important general good.’”

In a week in which America has mourned another leader named George, who began his own presidency with a prayer to “use power to help people”, Philbrick’s implicit lesson on successful leadership applies equally. Humility, not arrogance, ultimately triumphs: a truth sailors know from the violent, ever-changing sea.

John S Gardner, a writer in Alexandria, Virginia, was special assistant to George HW Bush and deputy assistant to George W Bush